Management Fads Mean Lost Sales
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The best thing about working in Sales is that it is truly an environment "money talks and BS walks." While the sales training world has its share of fads, if a technique or concept doesn't work, it has a half-life of about two weeks, at best.
Not so in the rest of the corporate world. Every year, thousands of companies get caught up in management fads that leach the productivity of everyone. Sometimes sales teams are isolated from the nonsens...e, but more often then not, the sales reps end up paying a "productivity tax" until the fad dies out.
For example, suppose a company goes all gung-ho on Six Sigma. The sales team can count on spending at least two or three days in meetings with people who have never sold in their lives where they explain how to "eliminate errors" in the sales process.
Below is a list of the eight dumbest management fads. (Click on any of the fads to get a more detailed take.) If any of these fads takes root in your firm, immediately adjust your forecast down, because you're about to be inundated with total nonsense:
- FAD #1: Six Sigma -- Potbellied managers running around with little colored belts like they're part of some Bruce Lee movie on Bizarro world. Pul-eeeze...
- FAD #2: Business Process Reengineering -- Massively changing a corporation while it's operating islike trying to redesign and retool an automobile while you're driving down the highway.
- FAD #3: Matrix Management -- All productive work grinds to an immediate halt as managers become completely absorbed over who really has control of the employees.
- FAD #4: Management by Consensus -- The group unanimously agrees on a course of action that no individual member of the group desires and is guaranteed to fail.
- FAD #5: Core Competence -- The conscious creation of a corporate myth that keeps a company locked into doing what it was successful at doing in the past. Long term death ensues.
- FAD #6: Management By Objective -- You create scores of planning documents and precious little to show for it. Success rate in the typical company is around 6% percent.
- FAD #7: The Search for Excellence -- At best, you get a me-too strategy. At worst, you successfully implement a strategy that put another company out of business.
- FAD #8: Management By God -- Employees are forced into mandatory prayer meetings, the primary result of which is to convince them that their manager is a horse's rear end.
READERS: Have you ever run into these fads where you work?
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